Ted Bogosian is one of those uncommon journalists and filmmakers for whom the stark truth of the matter is all that counts. Truth at the far pole from truthiness. Emotional truth. Historical truth. Negotiable truth, which is to say: politically useful truth. Truth so awful sometimes that most of us -- whether victims, perps or bystanders -- would just as soon turn away.
In James Der Derian's "Global Media" class at Brown, Ted Bogosian is speaking about the PBS documentary that made him famous in 1988: An Armenian Journey was the first, and almost the last, network television treatment in America of the Turkish slaughter of Armenians in 1915. We're talking as well about the suddenly hot pursuit of pedophile priests in the Catholic church. Also about Errol Morris's "feel-bad masterpiece," the almost unwatched S.O.P., a film search through interviews and reenactments for the truth of Abu Ghraib. And about Kathryn Bigelow's best-picture Oscar winner The Hurt Locker, yet another box-office bomb about the American war in Iraq.
Listen in on the conversation here:
TB: Being Armenian requires a different standard of truth telling. What's in your DNA is this business of overcoming denial... The first thing in my life I remember is standing in my backyard in New Jersey, watching my grandmother, who was a survivor of the genocide, making a pile of rocks and telling me, in her broken English, that "nothing mattered." And for her to be saying that to a 3-year-old boy, based on what she had witnessed, started my journey toward making that film 30 years later, which was about all the apocryphal stories and all the real stories I had heard growing up. I had to decide for myself which ones were true. And when I did, I had to figure out a way to relate those truths to the world. So I think it's different for Armenians and for other ethnic groups trying to overcome similar denials.
CL: In other words, truth hounds don't just happen.
TB: There has to be a powerful momentum, an irresistible force, pushing you in that direction. Otherwise it's too easy to take the path of least resistance.
Ted Bogosian's story of his own motivation could be construed as ethnic determinism or something stranger: a rationale for ethnic revenge by journalism. But I think we're scratching at a subtler puzzle that popped up as a surprise here: what are the journalistic motives that seem to be bred in the bone, or in the family histories that drive a lifetime of the most urgent professional curiosity?